A Time Travel - or the history of time-measure
The dawn
The human ambition to measure, to regulate and to domesticate the nature of time has a long history. The fundament of this measuring was the astronomy. Already in the 5th century, before the occidental calculation of times, Egyptian scientists began to deal with the creation of a calendar.
In the 8th century before Christ the astronomers had reached a high reliability in defining the move of the luminaries. The sky was mysterious and informative at the same time. Time was something divine. Therefore it was often reserved to priests to put stones in the course of time to manage their dynamic. The sun has had a special role in the divine sky all times.
The old Egyptians had been ahead of the times because they understood day and night as parts of the same phenomenon. Starting from Egypt the sundials spread over Greece into the Roman Empire.
The structuring of time in past, present and future which seems trivial today is an "invention" of Parmenides of Elea.
Aristotle discovered the time as a real scientific object that he interpreted as steadily flowing.
Beside the sun also the second element - the water - established itself as an object of time measurement. Also here the Egyptians were first. Only in this century archeologists discovered snatches of a clepsydra (water clock) which is dated 14th century before Christ. No more than about 900 years later also the Greeks in Athens were able to combine the sundial with the clepsydra in form of the "tower of wind". So it was also a student of Archimedes, a barber named Ktesibios, who applied the laws of hydraulics and mechanics to clocks. Therewith he built a clepsydra with dial and hands and furthermore advanced the exactness basically.